Questioningly: Work It

Last week, we asked you to change a pop song so that it would be more appropriate for the Romney-Ryan ticket. It was a highly political week, what with the convention and all.

This week, though, we’re shifting gears and looking ahead to Labor Day. It’s a holiday for celebrating work in all forms, even fictional forms. That’s the basis of this week’s question, which is both simple and complicated. The question is: What is worst job in all of literature? What does it mean? Well, it’s sort of up to you. It can be a real job—an actual character in an actual book—but it can also be an invented job, implied or extrapolated part from a work of fiction. Ahab’s shrink, for example, or Adam and Eve’s marriage counselor.

Got it? Insert yourself into the world of literature, find the worst job, and tell us what it is. Then put your answer in a tweet, and don’t forget to include the hashtag #tnyquestion. Questioningly runs Fridays until Monday morning, when we’ll tweet the best suggestions and then, for an hour, try to perform those jobs.

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As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.